Mission day 103. Honey Badger has been taking some hits. It's got a twisted umbilical, some goofy data from one of the sensors, something may be living in the Phytoflash chamber, it's been through 3 storms, and one of the redundant GPS sensors (kind of important for getting home) may be problematic. Cara, Danny Merritt (our mission coordinator) and myself considered all the omens and decided that it's time for Honey Badger to start the trip home.
It will take a while since we are something on the order of 600 nautical miles north of Hawaii and there is plenty of good science left to do. We are currently in a small bloom and as soon as we reach the next waypoint (about 25 nautical miles), Honey Badger will take a sharp right for the journey home.
Honey Badger at sea
Friday, September 11, 2015
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Ignacio
Honey Badger is brushing with Ignacio today and the conditions look rough. There are 20-24 foot waves, winds blowing at 35+ knots. It's good day to be somewhere else. Here's the wind field from a NOAA model captured on windyty.com. It's pretty impressive and also shows another storm sneaking up from the south. Honey Badger is at the pointy base of the teardrop
The surface currents are pushing us north and combined with the wave-propulsion, Honey Badger is making about 2 knots speed over ground. That doesn't sound like much, last week we were becalmed and barely making 0.1 kts SOG. Big difference!
All three fluorometers are showing an increase in fluorescence. The Fo from the phytoflash is shown here:
The spiking is interesting to think about. There are few studies of how oceanic phytoplankton react to the passage of cyclones of this size. For obvious reasons, it's hard to be in the right place at the right time. One study in the Pacific during a large wind event noted a post-storm increase primary production, biomass and in the material sinking out of the euphotic zone by larger size fraction material. The LISST-Holo data will have such size fraction information (assuming it is working and gets home), and should be a pretty unique data set on the biological response at the surface. In a perfect world, we could clone Honey Badger and send it back into the wake of the storm, but that's a week or more in the wrong direction. Since we have not yet sampled an active bloom, we will have to stay on-mission and avoid such distractions (but it would be sooo much fun...).
The surface currents are pushing us north and combined with the wave-propulsion, Honey Badger is making about 2 knots speed over ground. That doesn't sound like much, last week we were becalmed and barely making 0.1 kts SOG. Big difference!
All three fluorometers are showing an increase in fluorescence. The Fo from the phytoflash is shown here:
The spiking is interesting to think about. There are few studies of how oceanic phytoplankton react to the passage of cyclones of this size. For obvious reasons, it's hard to be in the right place at the right time. One study in the Pacific during a large wind event noted a post-storm increase primary production, biomass and in the material sinking out of the euphotic zone by larger size fraction material. The LISST-Holo data will have such size fraction information (assuming it is working and gets home), and should be a pretty unique data set on the biological response at the surface. In a perfect world, we could clone Honey Badger and send it back into the wake of the storm, but that's a week or more in the wrong direction. Since we have not yet sampled an active bloom, we will have to stay on-mission and avoid such distractions (but it would be sooo much fun...).
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